The Sun Shines Through

I had a feeling of doom laying low in my stomach for much of yesterday. It rested there and wasn't bothered by the bouncing of the bus as I made my way to Mason for my conference with Professor Jann. It was bothered slightly by rambunctious children in their costumes, riding the bus with me, but not enough to go away and leave me. I was early for my meeting and so I killed some time in the Fenwick library, the library on campus that makes me happy and comfortable in its dusty world of knowledge and mediocre mid-Sixties design.

I made my way up to the English department on the 4th floor of Robinson A. As I clomped up the stairs I was reminded of something one of my professors said while struggling up to the top floor, where they'd ensconced the literary nuts like him. It made me smile. Standing outside my professor's door, eavesdropping on her conference with a classmate and reading the fliers, comics and political statements of my previous professors, made my heart stop racing.
In Professor Jann's office her commonsense and cheery disposition frightened the feeling of doom away. Listening to her comments on my paper, which were pretty good for a rough draft to receive, made me feel capable again, and her ideas and way of listening to mine made me feel intelligent and almost like a peer. She laughed at my description of my Halloween costume and when I told her a friend couldn't believe I had a conference on tonight of all nights.

Leaving her office full of determination and focus I marveled at how hearing someone's experienced opinions could calm me. When I'm all alone with my fears and inadequacies I tend to burrow into them, letting them cover and suffocate me without fighting back. Professor Jann and other professors I've had, are like a bright light shining through. She's like my Gandalf, if you will, shouting down the Balroq (Oh man, that's so geeky). And now I have an amusing vision of this thin, fairly plain, older professor with twinkling blue eyes (very much like Gandalf's!) in a robe and carrying a staff.

Here's some quotes about failure to cement my position as today's resident literary geek:

Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid." -John Keats

The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed. ~Lloyd Jones

Panic at the thought of doing a thing is a challenge to do it. ~Henry S. Haskins

I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear and which to creativeness. Other things being equal, I would make the decision which had the larger number of creative reasons on its side. ~Katharine Butler Hathaway

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety. ~Henry Louis Mencken

There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear. ~George S. Patton

Many of our fears are tissue-paper-thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them. ~Brendan Francis

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them. ~Andre Gide